Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoJohn Minchillo | ASSOCIATED PRESSPete Seeger, an activist since the 1930s, and his grandson Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, with a guitar, march to folk and gospel songs at an Occupy Wall Street protest in New York.

Tao Rodriguez-Seeger was halfway through a march down Broadway to support the Occupy Wall Street
movement, a guitar strapped over his shoulder and his grandfather Pete Seeger at his side.
Suddenly, a New York City police officer grabbed his elbow.

Rodriguez-Seeger was certain that his arrest was imminent. The officer reached for his hand.
Then something unexpected happened.

“He shook my hand and said: ‘Thank you, thank

you. This is beautiful,’ ” Rodriguez-Seeger said. “That really did it for me. The cops
recognized what we were about.”

That moment affirmed the message that his 92-year-old grandfather has preached tirelessly across
nine decades. The causes and movements have changed from time to time in those years, but his
message has always been the same: Music is the key to understanding and change.

“Music does something to you,” said Rodriguez-Seeger, 39. “It can cross rivers of meaning that
entire books can’t get across. You take any one of Bob Dylan’s songs, and you get to the heart of
the matter, where it took Homer volumes and volumes of books to get to the same point.”

Today, Pete Seeger is in the final chapter of a life in which he has walked hand in hand with
American history, often at odds with the government.

This time around, Seeger was supported by two canes, not the sound of his banjo. But his
presence, in a crowd of nearly 1,000 with guitar players and chanting sign-holders and police
swirling around, gave the movement something it seemed to lack during the past month.

Seeger’s voice rose in the 1930s against Hitler. He met Woody Guthrie, Alan Lomax and Lead
Belly, and he began to advocate for migrant workers and miners in the 1940s. He stared down Sen.
Joseph McCarthy and endured a blacklisting that he simply shrugged off. As a founding member of the
Weavers, he was a key figure in the folk revival that produced Dylan. And he was later involved in
the protests that helped shape modern America.

Seeger still takes delight in lending his presence to causes, even if his voice doesn’t carry as
it used to. He found himself attracted to the Wall Street protests.

“Be wary of great leaders,” Seeger said when asked what he identifies with in the Occupy Wall
Street message. “Hope that there are many, many small leaders.”

Other than the canes and snowy beard, Seeger hasn’t changed much since he began singing out
against fascism in the mid-1930s, after dropping out of Harvard in frustration.

“The sociology professor said, ‘Don’t think that you can change the world. The only thing you
can do is study it,’ ” Seeger said. “But this was 1937, and Hitler had taken power. He was
murdering people and was ready to go to war.”

You could say Seeger inherited his activism. His great-great-grandfather came to America seeking
self-determination after reading the Declaration of Independence. His great-grandfather was an
abolitionist. His father was a socialist who spoke out against World War I.

The son of a musicologist and a violinist, he began leading others in song at 8 and was
introduced to protest music around 12. Early on, he saw beauty and possibility in traditional songs
often considered regional hokum or race records unfit for a white audience.

His message found an eager audience in the young generation that would go on to define rock ’n’
roll, changing American and world culture in myriad ways. He introduced the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr. to
We Shall Overcome. In his hands, songs such as
If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song) and
Turn! Turn! Turn! became galvanizing anthems.

He remains a voice for the disenfranchised — the poor of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta,
and the victims of racism and greed.

Rodriguez-Seeger was attracted to the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement, he said, when he
joined a support march two weeks ago in Las Vegas. He was drawn to the anti-

establishment message but noticed immediately that something was missing.

“I saw a lot of people getting angry at us for marching, getting out of their SUVs and giving us
the finger and screaming obscenities” and using anti-gay slurs, Rodriguez-Seeger said. “I thought,
if we were singing right now, my gut tells me they’d be less inclined to behave like that because
it’s very difficult when you’re hearing music to get that angry.”